Darren Beale Web developer & early adopter

Authorbealers

Hi, I'm Bealers and I use this blog to share some of the things I learn whilst I'm on my journey. If you're new to the site then you might want to start here. The best place to find me is on Instagram.

Fix Virtualbox Symlinks in Guest share on Windows host

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Note to self In my [[Windows 10 dev environment]] I have a shared folder between the host machine (my laptop) and the guest VM. The ability to create symlinks within the guest is disabled by default in Virtualbox because security. These steps work to fix that. Add this to Vagrantfile `config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |v| v.customize ["setextradata", :id...

OneNote & emoji 🏃💨

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It turns out that OneNote supports emoji in page & section titles (notebook names too). I had no idea, though I shouldn’t be surprised really; they are just fancy Unicode characters after all. Anyway, I’ve tested this on the full Windows desktop version, iOS and the online web view. They consistently render as you’d expect for the operating system that you’re viewing...

OneNote Sync To OneDrive Explained

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To get the most power out of OneNote you want to be able to synchronise the contents of your notebooks between devices and possibly share them with other people. Cloud based save, sync or sharing is a standard requirement for most software these days and OneNote is no exception by offering such a feature. However, due to the smart way that OneNote handles synchronisation and coupled with the fact...

Evernote Page Tagging in OneNote

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If you’re coming over to OneNote from Evernote you might immediately miss the ability to tag your pages as you’re used to.
Evernote’s page level tagging is a powerful feature but what you may not know is that you can effectively emulate this feature in OneNote too.

OneNote Synchronisation Strategy

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OneNote does some clever things under the hood to provide you with pain-free multi-user synchronisation across your devices. However, a common complaint is that it can be slow to update if the notebook has lots of large embedded PDFs or files. This is pretty understandable if you take a minute to think about it. Adding a lot of new class notes or handouts and then syncing them over dodgy...

Dear OneNote API dev team

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Hi,
I’m only writing this publicly as I don’t know how to get hold of you, and that’s kind of the point.
Sure there are many official channels including your website, Uservoice, Stack Overflow and even Twitter, but none of these seem suitable for certain circumstances.

Manage Your Week with Timeboxing

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As we all know there is only so much time in one day. We can use various productivity methodologies to define & track what we need to get done in any given day but the fact remains there is a finite time available to get all that stuff done. One ‘trick’ we can use to cram more in is to extend the time available, by working into the evenings or weekends though this, like most...

Canoeing from Loch Morar to Loch Arkaig

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I recently came back from my second canoeing expedition in the highlands of Scotland. The first trip was fantastic but felt too short so we vowed to come back again but do it for longer. Fast forward a few years and with a deep yearning to reconnect with the wilderness we (me & Wes) set off from Shropshire on the Thursday morning with our two 16′ Canadian canoes and all our kit in...

OneNote on OSX, first impressions

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Recently I moved to Apple’s OSX as my primary operating system. It has gone very smoothly with me taking a Macbook Air on holiday (with no work or email loaded onto it!) so I could get used to it and when back I had a few transition days where I did productive work with both old & new machine side by side. One thing I was extremely nervous about was what the brand new OSX OneNote would...

Halt all Vagrant/VirtualBox VMs one-liner

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If you’re using Vagrant to control your dev VMs on a headless server it’s easy to lose track of the number of running machines.
Here’s a one-liner to gracefully shut-down all of them to free up some resources.
for VM in `VBoxManage list runningvms | awk ‘{ print $2; }’`; do VBoxManage controlvm $VM poweroff; done

Darren Beale Web developer & early adopter